


Just That Good

by Glinda



Category: Leverage
Genre: Aliases, Bittersweet, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Mutually Unrequited, Past Relationship(s), implied Eliot/Nate, past Nate/Maggie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-09 01:45:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15256677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: Good ain't all that good's made out to be...





	Just That Good

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fleurting](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleurting/gifts).



> I spotted this prompt as a pinch-hit, but while someone else beat me to claiming it, I was feeling inspired so I wrote a story for it anyway. Hope you enjoy! Not my usual pairing in this fandom but I had lots of fun writing it so thank you!

The first time that Eliot and Sophie met, they had no idea who each other were. They gave each other the fake names they were using for the job and told each other secrets that were only half true. They drowned their frustrations and triumphs in each other’s skin without any expectation of ever seeing each other again. They hid who they truly were from each other so well that even after years of working together it would be a surprise to realise that they had in fact met before. They talk about it only obliquely while they’re working on stealing the dagger second time around. 

“Guess we’re just that good,” Eliot teases her. 

“Or maybe neither of us is who we used to be,” Sophie parries before changing the subject. There are some truths that neither of them wants to look at too closely. 

~

When the team gets back together the first time, Eliot teaches Sophie to fight, it takes a fair bit of persuasion but she eventually acquiesces. He teaches Sophie self defence for the same reason he teaches Parker, the same reason he teaches Hardison, because he cares about them and he doesn’t know how else to safely show them that. His job is to protect them, but he can’t be everywhere, and now that he’s invested in the crew he worries about them whenever they’re out of sight. 

So he’d planned to teach her anyway, but it gets bumped up his list of priorities when he realises that her ability to see through him, to see him clearly, is making her afraid of him. 

“Eliot, you’re what’s scaring me,” she tells him and he knows then and there that this situation is not tenable. It’s important that they have a certain level of ‘healthy respect’ for what he’s capable of, so that they understand the consequences of what they ask him to do. So they use him wisely. They should walk without fear through the world, safe in the knowledge that he’s the scariest thing out there and he’s on their side. But there’s a difference between afraid of the things he can do, and being afraid of him as a person. 

(Parker isn’t afraid of him. Parker is afraid of all the ways they are alike, reluctant to know exactly what he’s capable of, because she suspects that that means she’s capable of it too. He can’t teach her not to fear that, he doesn’t want to, he thinks it reveals her as a better person than she believes herself to be. Instead he teaches her control, to use the violence they both carry within them to protect rather than to harm.) 

The one thing that Sophie and Eliot have most in common, is their skill at reading what people want or need them to be, and giving it to them. At only showing other people what they want to see. Of all the skills and tricks that Sophie has taught him over the years, it’s the way she’s taught him to refine his natural predisposition for this that he values the most, the way she makes him feel that it’s a skill to be used rather than a character flaw.

Eliot lies with his mouth and with his eyes, but not with his body. He can feint in a fight, or look like an ordinary Joe in a suit, but the potential for danger lurks under the surface and he can’t hide that for long. Isn’t entirely sure he wants to, he’s a hitter for a reason. He knows this is a flaw in his skillset, that it limits his grifting, but it also means there’s something to trade. Teaching Sophie to fight lets her learn how he moves, the lies he can and cannot tell with his body. It’s fascinating watching her learn and discover that first hand, and the way that shapes what she teaches him in turn. The reassurance she seems to get from knowing he could fool anyone but her is every bit as valuable as the improvements in her left hook. 

The whole incident with the tea is proof enough that she has no need to be afraid of him. She could kill him whenever she wanted and she wouldn’t even need to touch him. It bugs him, but he’s proud of her all the same. It’s a price he’s willing to pay to be certain she isn’t afraid of him any more. 

And if sometimes she uses her newfound skills to tumble him down onto the nearest soft surface rather than the practice mats, then, well, that’s a little extra bonus for both of them. 

~

After Sophie comes back to them and Nate goes to prison, she’s somehow both far stronger and far more fragile than she was before. She’s more certain of who she is but equally she’s reluctant to leave that person unprotected. That’s alright by the rest of the team though, these last few months have left them all feeling vulnerable and exposed so they’re happy to acknowledge that and let her use it to bind them all back together. Giving them her real name and having them use it all the time helps her settle fully back into her skin. Letting the rest of them get to know and trust Laura, while simultaneously denying Nate that same intimacy, turns out to be a really effective apology to the rest of the team. It also seems to make it easier for her to slip back into Sophie when she needs to, whether for a job or for Nate. Knowing that the others can see the join is important both to her and to the rest of the team. A gesture of trust that goes both ways. 

It’s then that he first starts cooking for the team on a regular basis. He suspects that Sophie thinks she conned him into it the first few times, but honestly he had jumped at the excuse. He loves feeding them and they love being fed, it binds them together, lets them bond when the bar downstairs is too haunted by Nate’s absence. 

The first time they sleep together it’s definitely about Nate. It’s angry and aggressive, and if the sheets don’t still smell of him, then his ghost is definitely lingering in the room. They don’t talk about it, because frankly neither of them has a leg to stand on if asked ‘were you fucking him or me’? But they’re good together, and they understand each other, no need for lies or pretty words. The push and pull of the tension between them keeps them balanced and allows them to keep the team itself balanced. Allows them to walk the necessary tightrope. 

They all call Sophie by her real name, so he calls her that in bed too, using it sparingly so he doesn’t get too addicted to the way she responds to that. A particular intimacy he suspects that he doesn’t deserve but treasures nonetheless. 

It’s an affair with a time limit, an unspoken agreement, that this is just until Nate comes back. And somehow that frees them up to throw themselves into it completely, without worry or concern that one or other of them will feel too much or too little. No need for pretence or protecting themselves. It is what it is. A release and an indulgence. Something transitory between friends but strangely realer than many actual relationships either of them has had over the years. 

~

There’s something inevitable about the way Nate and Sophie fall into each other’s arms. The way they pretend it’s nothing important until they can’t any more. As though they aren’t each other’s temptation of choice, the one drug neither of them really want to quit. 

Eliot worries, because he’s seen to many love affairs like that go up in flames. It’s less that he thinks they won’t survive the fallout, more than he fears that the team won’t. He can’t quite make Sophie understand that, that he isn’t jealous – whom she sleeps with is none of his business unless it affects the team, and it’s not as though he thought _he_ was good enough for her - he’s worried. If the team implodes he’ll stay with Parker and Hardison no question about it - he's bound to them now, in ways he cannot explain - but they’re not ready to do this without Nate and Sophie yet, personally or professionally. 

He misses that certainty of knowing they were on the same side about that more than almost anything else. 

~

It’s strange at first; being Leverage without them. It takes a bit of getting used to, both personally and professionally. Sometimes Eliot wants to run away and never look back, but he can’t, he promised her. He appreciates what she was trying to do with her words, giving him an excuse to stay when he feels he ought to go. For all that Nate claimed to never know what Eliot needed, he’d been pretty good at providing it for Eliot. Sophie on the other hand has always known what he needs, and just how terrible he was at asking for it. He supposes it shows just how far they’ve all come that he could acknowledge it, in front of an audience, even if most of that audience already knew the truth. 

Another way he and Sophie are alike, they are far better at asking for what they want, than for what they need. 

They are also, both traditionalists in their own unique ways. So despite the fact she and Nate have been living together for months and sleeping together for longer, she makes a big production of not spending the night before the wedding together. One last night of ‘freedom’ about which they will ask each other no questions and tell each other no lies. Talking it over earlier with Hardison and Parker over dinner in the brewpub, the three of them had concluded that the likeliest outcome was that both parties would spend the evening flirting with attractive strangers and being reminded how glad they were to be leaving that part of their lives behind. 

Therefore, Eliot is both surprised and not surprised when Sophie lets herself into his apartment that night. It’s been a long time since they last did this so it’s probably fitting that on this night of lasts, she’d want to come here. He pours her some wine and assembles her a plate of her favourite nibbles, and she arranges herself carefully and delicately on a stool at his rarely used breakfast bar. Their conversation drifts from topic to topic with the ease of many late nights talking and eating together. This is how they started all that time ago, so when she leans across to kiss him, it doesn’t occur to him to resist. 

(He doesn’t ask if Nate knows where she is tonight. He doesn’t know if Nate ever knew about him and Sophie, and whether or not he’d approve of her saying goodbye to him like this. If he’s sitting somewhere else with Maggie, getting a very different kind of closure – or perhaps saying the same kind of goodbye. Instead he surrenders control of the embrace and focusing on making this last kiss a good one.)

She pushes him down onto the bed and says, “Eliot, please.”

He knows what she’s asking, just as surely as he knows that it’s not Sophie he has in his arms right now. 

One of the great joys of the team these days is the way he doesn’t have to hide parts of himself. The way he can be himself with all its contradictions, it’s strengths and flaws. 

So he lets all his own masks fall away, lets her see the person she already knows lurks beneath the surface, lets them both revel in that particular kind of intimacy. An honesty that he suspects they’ve only ever been able to share with each other. 

“Why?” he asks her afterwards, reluctant to spoil the afterglow, but unwilling to be left always wondering.

“Because you loved Laura first,” she tells him, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. 

To Nate, however well he gets to know Laura, she will always be the person Sophie used to be. Knowing her is a privilege to him, but ultimately she’s just an aspect of the multifaceted person that he loves. Nate has learned and loved all the people Sophie has been, but its Sophie that he needs. And Sophie herself, she loves Nate and has grown to need the way he needs her. But Laura, no one had ever loved her before. People had always wanted her to be something she wasn’t and she’d learned to be whatever people wanted her to be. She’d built all her identities as performances, as masks, as armour that she could put on and take off at will. Her many selves have loved and lost over the years, but Laura has been sheltered and shielded from both the joy and the pain. Except here, Eliot realises, he’s been the safe harbour to bury all the feelings that Laura never gets to express or act upon. Is it still unrequited love if you know the other person feels the same, he wonders, if you just mutually agree that you prefer to keep it in some kind of eternal limbo? Eliot has loved her because she was safe to love, wanting nothing from him except that he know her. He loves this woman she isn’t anymore, this ghost that she carries with her always, and apparently that’s as precious to her as it is to him.

“I do,” he agrees, “always will.” 

Eliot has been in love twice in his life. One who loved who he used to be and let him pretend he was still that person. The other who knows who he really is and loves him not in spite of that but because of it. Years ago she stole his heart like the thief she’s always been, and she’ll keep it somewhere safe and hidden for him, so no one else can ever hurt him. 

A gift both unspoken and unspeakably precious to them both.


End file.
